AT#23: How to use your Wisdom to make existing Practices agile

AT#23: How to use your Wisdom to make existing Practices agile

Whenever I discuss with people from the Agile world what ‘Agile’ is all about, they tell me that it’s very core is a mindset that is established through values and principles.

All agile practices, methods, and frameworks evolve out of this mindset. Ahmed Sidky visualizes this idea in his ->webinar:

When I saw this picture my gut told me that there is something fundamentally wrong with this idea. It took me weeks to find out why:

Practices never emerge out of mindsets. All mature practices have evolved out of specialized disciplines after decades of experience of highly educated people.

And practices do not evolve isolated from each other. They enrich other practices through exchange and learning. You might even be able to jump onto an adjacent one and skip a few levels, bringing your experience but adopting a different mindset.

The following picture shows how professional practices emerge out of study and experience rather than belief in values:

If you are a surgeon who agrees with the values of the Hippocratic Oath, it is not enough to perform a heart surgery.
If you are an ‘Agile Coach’ who agrees to the values of the Agile Manifesto, it should not be enough to do management consulting…

What you should do:

Use and foster your wisdom created in decades of experience in disciplines like Business Process Management, Business Analysis, Project Management, Enterprise Architecture…

Apply the four agile values (lean, iterative, collaborative, customer-oriented) to the disciplines instead of implementing “new” agile practices that are based on agile values and belief in gurus only